Explaining Some Hardware Whinging—I Love My MacBook Air

First, I want to say this: though I worked at Apple to September 2013, I have no actual knowledge of Apple’s future hardware plans. So, on the off chance that I happened to sign an NDA relating to the device I’m commenting about, I honestly didn’t know that that was the case. I believe every hardware NDA I signed was for a product that’s already shipped.

In 2013, I switched from a 15″ MacBook Pro—I’d had several over the years—to a 13″ MacBook Air. I did it after Rick made the same move, and for the same reason: believe it or not, it’s actually faster on day-to-day activities, despite the slower CPU.

It’s also cheaper.

So what’s in the new report that I hate so much?

No Thunderbolt. I rely on Thunderbolt RAID for backup. That RAID array is Thunderbolt only. I also rely in an external 2TB hard drive I use just for graphics library (and Aperture) storage.
Look, I love Thunderbolt. I’ve invested heavily in it. If Apple’s dumping it on my preferred laptop model three years in, I’m pissed.
I don’t use Thunderbolt for displays, and I understand USB-C can drive displays. Thunderbolt is still a better, faster technology. By all means, replace the existing USB connectors with USB-C. That makes sense.

As enumerated earlier, I have numerous questions regarding Mark Gurman’s report that the upcoming next-generation MacBook Air does away with all ports other than two: a USB Type-C and a headphone jack.
But one that I keep thinking about is MagSafe. I can definitely see getting rid of classic USB — it’s old and thick. Thunderbolt, sort of. But MagSafe? When Apple announced MagSafe back in 2006, I knew they were solving a real problem, not an imaginary marketing problem. Tripping over power cables and yanking laptops off tables and onto floors was a real issue. I had an iBook way back when that ultimately died after one such incident too many. If anything, Apple has made MagSafe 2 even easier to pull apart, not harder. Switching to USB Type-C seems like it would take us all the way back to days when tripping over the charging cable would take your laptop along for the ride.

Elimination of physical key feedback. That’s a big nope from me. If that’s the way Apple’s headed for all keyboards, I’m going to have to look to Microsoft as my preferred keyboard vendor. That’s a painful thing to say.

Elimination of the SD Card slot. I love that I don’t have to keep track of some small doodad, and I can just pack my laptop, my cameras, my iPad/Phone, a power cord and a lightning cable when I travel. It’s one more thing I have to track, and I’d really miss this.

In short, this looks like a light-use computer for people who either a) don’t use computers or b) use another computer as their primary computer. I’m one of those people who uses a MacBook Air as my sole computer, and that’s the way I’d like to keep it.

So Why Not Go to a 13″ MacBook Pro?

13″ MacBook Air tricked out with 8G (max) memory and 512G (max) Flash & 1.7 GHz CPU: $1,749 (before other things like AppleCare and any accessories).

Here’s the thing: a 13″ MacBook Pro does not have the same amount of area on the screen. So, in order to get the same effective 1440×900 resolution, I’d have to go back to a 15″ MBP. Further, I can’t go with an 8GB and have the same effective memory because retina uses more memory.

15″ MacBook Pro with 16G (only) memory, 512G (min) Flash & 2.5 GHz (min) CPU: $2,499. I could argue that, for a true replacement, it’d also have to bump up another $500 for the 1TB flash because, again, the retina machine will use more memory for things like swap, so the real price is $2,999.

Twelve hundred bucks is a lot of difference for better external drive support and a better power cable.

The scream you just heard was me, from all the way from the West Coast of Florida. I already made the decision to bite the bullet and upgrade and I can already hear my sister-in-law the Microsoft SysEng smugly telling me not to keep buying more Apple products no matter how slickly they interpreted.

BTW, I just had my first big snafu with the new “smart house” security system. It sent an intruder alert when my 7 lb cat hit the door after it was armed. Even entering the correct code to disarm was futile and the nice lady shouting through the speaker system mounted in my hallway kept telling me my security password was wrong. That password is less than 2 weeks old, I know what I selected and I am not senile but I am too exasperated to deal with them tonight. It’s going to be tomorrow’s problem unless SWAT surrounds this place.

Just because there’s a machine that’s a prototype doesn’t mean that (if the reports are accurate) that’s a machine that’ll go into production. I’d expect hardware companies to try out some things that turn out to be dead ends.

LOL, hope the SWAT team doesn’t come your way and you get it all sorted.

Hi Deirdre… I guess I’m surprised that someone who’s worked at Apple doubts their forward thinking ideas. Of all your concerns, I think only the magsafe connector is the only real point to be made. hear me out.

No Thunderbolt. I think in order to make the new Macbook Air smaller and thinner, Apple will move all connections OFF the laptop itself and perhaps onto the brick of the power cord. Imagine this: plug the power cord into the USB type C port and coming off it, the brick has Thunderbolt, USB, perhaps even an SD card slot as the type C connection is able to drive those.
Elimination of key feedback. I think you misread this one. Because the trackpad sits at the thinnest part of the computer, the idea is to remove the “click”ability of this in order to make the computer even thinner. There is nothing in the rumours about eliminating click feedback from the actual keyboard itself.
Keyboard squeeze. You have a bit of a valid point here… but as with anything, constant use and you will get used to a slightly tighter keyboard array.

I could tell stories, but I won’t give specifics. I guess the most disheartening thing about working at Apple is the “we’ve already shipped this” (or “we’ve shipped worse”) viewpoint when it comes to usability issues. The only specific thing I’ve said in public is that every time we had to punt an accessibility bug to Later, I died a little inside. That’s someone who could not use some feature we’d spent time on. My own experience is that accessibility attitude problems stem from top down.

In fact, I’ve wanted to write something in response to this piece (especially footnote 1) and this piece about Apple’s software QA, but it just makes me so angry I don’t wind up writing anything. Not because they’re wrong. Because they’re right.

So here’s my fear, based on my experience: once it’s not shipped once, whether that approach works for others or not, I don’t really see, based on the endemic attitude I saw at Apple, as it being possible to ship it again. Apple likes to do a mean girls shunning of technologies that are suddenly out of fashion, and once one device drops, so do others. Now, granted, some of those? Deserved to die. ADB, for example.

Others, not so much.

Now, if they moved the Thunderbolt off onto the power adapter? That might be interesting, but it doesn’t solve one big problem: Thunderbolt’s still faster than USB-C. And, God, it’s been way more years than I want to admit to since I’ve read the USB spec (pre-Leopard era, I’m pretty sure), and I really haven’t read about it deeply in a while, but my recollection is that transfer polling was kind of like an old Corvus Star network. Anyhow, my recollection was back when I first read about it that Thunderbolt sounded far saner topology-wise.

But I’ll freely admit that I’m not a hardware person. That doesn’t mean I don’t have strong opinions about hardware I like, though.

On the key feedback, I may have misunderstood. I really don’t like the idea of removing clickability, but it’s not as much of a showstopper as the keys are. There’s also some precedent for the potential error here: people who don’t type 100+ WPM tend to forget that those of us who do need that feedback.

For the keyboard squeeze, well, Apple knows exactly how large my hands are. It’s on file somewhere. 🙂 I wear a men’s small glove as my hands are wide but short. If I have a problem with squeezing it further, they’d better test it with some dudes who wear men’s large or men’s extra large gloves.

As far as the ports go, keep in mind we’re talking about an Air here. People have whined about the port limitations on the Air from the first one, and people who use Airs just get on with enjoying their fabulous little computers.

As for the SD card slots, really, who cares? It’s somehow easier to yank the card out of camera and stuff that into your computer than it is to just plug a USB cable into camera and computer? Really? Trust me, you’ll get over this somehow. The only thing I’ve used the SD Card slot on my MBP for is preparing boot volumes for FreeNAS and ESXi to go in Dell 1U’s. lol.

We all know Apple likes to keep the Air at the forefront of what’s possible in terms of compute capability vs. size. I don’t know if the 12-inch form factor will actually fly, vs. for instance a Retina Air at 13″, but the thinness in some of the renderings has got to have the Air design staff attention. I can easily picture an Air power brick with a couple of USB-C ports on the side, and maybe even a Thunderbolt port for reattaching all those lovely RAID boxes.

The biggest loss, agreeing with the commenter above, the most crucial loss, would be the safety of the MagSafe connector. My lovely spouse ruined two laptops and nearly destroyed a third before she got her first white MB, and has kick MagSafe connectors out hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of times since then. Unless and until the USB cabal strikes a deal with Apple and comes up with a MagSafe USB-C connector, I just don’t see MagSafe going away. Especially not as light and ‘flingable’ as this new Air would be.